As someone who lived and purchased records in Philadelphia for some 32 years, I hope you will enjoy reading this as much as I did. Anyone else remember Simon Roberts, who held court in the basement of Nathan Muchnik’s? I was just thinking about him the other day, recollecting his withering putdown of “deranged Bruckner fanatics,” even though it must be decades since he uttered it. How wonderful record shopping in Philadelphia used to be. Thank you, Princeton Record Exchange, for keeping the spark alive!
At the core of this blog post, at the first link, is a reminiscence by Mark Obert-Thorn. If you’re unfamiliar with him, look more closely at the credits of any vintage reissues in your collection. Philadelphia-born Obert-Thorn and Ward Marston have dominated the field of historical restoration for decades. I believe Obert-Thorn’s musings, reprinted here, originally ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016.
https://digital.nepr.net/music/2016/08/05/shopping-for-classical-music-a-remembrance/
More about Obert-Thorn
https://www.naxos.com/historical/engineer_thorn.htm
His colleague, Ward Marston
https://www.naxos.com/historical/engineer_marston.htm
With the impending close of F.Y.E., this elegy for Center City record stores also ran in the Inky in 2016. I believe Peter Dobrin means the Schwann Catalog, not Schaum. I’m linking to Yahoo News, because the article in its Inquirer incarnation is paywalled.
Personally, I found F.Y.E. a mite soulless. You had to brave whatever head-splitting commercial swill they were pumping into the cavernous primary sales floor in order to reach the classical oasis in the back (once it was ejected from upstairs to make way for DVDs). I did, however, meet Wolfgang Sawallisch there and hear a mini-Liszt recital performed by Lang Lang. Come to think of it, that may have been when the store, located at Broad & Chestnut, was still Tower Records. As it was, that Tower never filled the hole in my heart left by the Tower Records Classical Annex at 6th & South. When that store closed, part of me went with it.
The line in Dobrin’s article that for me most resonates:
“Back when music was harder to get, listeners valued it more. When you spent a lot of time hunting for something, you reveled in the triumph of finding it.”
How many hours I spent on my back as a teenager, just listening to LPs and gazing at the cardboard sleeves, with their liner notes and eye-catching cover art. I learned as much about painting as I did about music back then, I think. When I only had a couple of crates of records, I knew every nuance, every crackle and pop so intimately. And intelligent classical music programming that honored the integrity of the music by broadcasting it in its entirely was available on the radio 24 hours a day. I miss those days so very, very much.